ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on the foundation of San Giorgio and its development from the Genoese compere and the mahone. The compere were sets of credits of the Genoese public debt. They had their origins in the investments in maritime enterprises. The mahone were enterprises whose activities ranged from iron extraction to the administration of entire islands. According to older investigations, the term mahona derived from the Arabic maʿūnah (mutual help). Using a previously unstudied source, I hypothesize that an Arabic institution called “maʿūnah” is connected to the Genoese maona of Ceuta. The chapter also analyzes the dissemination of the mahona in the late fifteenth century to previously unidentified localities in Italy such as Lucca and Messina. This is the first time this Mediterranean institution has been studied as a wide-ranging phenomenon rather than an exclusively Genoese one. Taking inspiration from the methodology of Elinor Ostrom’s “grammar of institution,” the chapter reconsiders several sources on the maona, analyzing both unknown and published documents and presenting new findings. This approach allows us to analyze not only where the word maona appears, but also how other words and statements connect to it.
